this is funny. I sent that story to a friend and prefaced it with the observation that we should have established a safe word before election season. I find republican stupidity to be highly entertaining, sometimes it gets him depressed. Which is probably the more normal response, since they are doing a pretty good job of destroying our country.

So aside from the white supremacists, Latinophobes who still haven’t forgiven Those People for blowing up the Maine, all the people who want to work in an American iPhone dungeon/manufacturing plant, Eastern European women who want to be Mrs Trump IV, dummies who think they might end up with an autographed hamburger shot of Sarah Palin if they show up at the Forty Minutes Hate rally, and the people who just want a Very Strong Leader for the New America, who are the people who want to see a President Trump?

My wife asks me why I am so interested in American politics……being a Canadian and all. I will stop and think for about five minutes and something absolutely crazy [like the above story] comes out. Pure gold.

The political scene up here is incredibly boring compared to you guys. Although truth be told, when you are talking about responsible governance, boring is generally pretty good.

Actually, I got in a back and forth on Twitter with “Women for Trump” trying to tease out what it was that they thought Trump would actually do for them, so they’re not all male, but all of his supporters are seriously delusional. As it turns out, that 27% magic number means that slightly more than 1 out of 4 people are certifiably insane.

FWIW Wilson’s comment isn’t entirely coming out of left field; he’s talking about the 4chan “alt-right” crowd, with whom he has a bit of a history of mutual trolling on Twitter. Jeet Heer of The New Republic has engaged with the same people on occasion (to whose benefit I am unable to fathom)

So aside from the white supremacists, Latinophobes who still haven’t forgiven Those People for blowing up the Maine, all the people who want to work in an American iPhone dungeon/manufacturing plant, Eastern European women who want to be Mrs Trump IV, dummies who think they might end up with an autographed hamburger shot of Sarah Palin if they show up at the Forty Minutes Hate rally, and the people who just want a Very Strong Leader for the New America, who are the people who want to see a President Trump?

My reaction was in the opposite direction: exactly how many more people are “GOP strategists” going to decide they can do without? They wrote off black people and most Latinos years ago, okay, fine, I suppose it made some sense especially in the seventies and eighties when the white vote was big enough that it didn’t matter so much. But they keep pushing the limits. No nonwhite people at all, including what used to be “their” demographics (Chinese-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, Muslims). No young people. Etc. Now the strategists are at the point where they actually think they can just handwave away Trump voters, i.e. the goddamn Republican base?

Knowing when to write off certain demographics is probably smart politics, but this isn’t that anymore – it’s become just a self-justification for not reaching out to anyone they don’t want to.

@Peale: I would much rather read subtitles than listen to an overdubbed soundtrack. I’m guessing there is over-acting in the Japanese soundtrack, but I don’t understand it, so it helps. There are a lot of overdubbed French movies, which totally ruins the whole experience

That is a very specific demographic sector. Do the pollsters know about this? And has there been any economic study done of the CSMWMTA sector to ascertain revenue and tax burdens to help explain the level of candidate support?

I’d pay for the cross-tabs against the SJW-MRA-Gamer demo’s. There’s a revolution stirring, and it sure as heck won’t be televised. Too icky!

@Bubblegum Tate: Exactly! The cross-over here is just begging for an HLN special.

My reaction was in the opposite direction: exactly how many more people are “GOP strategists” going to decide they can do without?

What should be scaring the GOP Establishment is the notion that Trump might steal from the existing GOP base and add new supporters.

From a recent story:

About one in 10 Americans who plan to cast a vote this election will do so for the first time in years, if ever, and Trump holds a decided edge with them, according to polling by Reuters/Ipsos. (http://tmsnrt.rs/1SgeLvi)

These voters offer Trump a pool of voters who could be decisive either in the Republican primaries or a general election. They could be crucial for Trump in early-voting states such as Iowa and South Carolina, where his nearest rival, Senator Ted Cruz, is putting pressure on Trump and enjoys a strong base of support with more traditionally conservative voters.

In Reuters/Ipsos polling from June to December 2015, 27.3 percent of these “new” voters said they would vote for Trump, higher than his poll numbers among independents and Republicans who regularly vote.

And I don’t think it is ever smart politics to write off certain demographics. This is not the same thing as a strategic (and often cynical) move to sacrifice some demographics because it will gain you significantly more voters elsewhere.

I would much rather read subtitles than listen to an overdubbed soundtrack. I’m guessing there is over-acting in the Japanese soundtrack, but I don’t understand it, so it helps.

Sometimes it’s just a question of which bad experience you will settle for. I recall a particularly bad Hong Kong film in which the overdubbed dialog seemed to have been written by someone who was more familiar with Australian English and slang than American English, while the subtitles were done by someone trying to do a poor literal translation from Cantonese to English that was as stiff as the English in an instruction manual.

Trump, with his emphasis on xenophobia and generalized authoritarian bluster instead of extensive God-talk and complaints about government regulations, is actually more like the extreme-right political candidates in European countries than he is a typical American conservative. If Trumpism becomes the new ideology of the Republicans, it’ll be a move toward more widespread international norms.

@Eric U.:
Japanese voice acting is an industry you go to school for and get careful training. As a result, there are a specific set of voices used by most voice actors/actresses for most characters, and only a few get something recognizably unique. Thus the ‘Oh ho ho ho ho’ villainess laugh that always sounds the same, for example. They’re taught that.

Trump, with his emphasis on xenophobia and generalized authoritarian bluster instead of extensive God-talk and complaints about government regulations, is actually more like the extreme-right political candidates in European countries than he is a typical American conservative.

Yep. On point. The leaders of the UK Independence Party must be gnashing their teeth over Trump’s popularity with a hard core of GOP voters.

@Eric U.: According to my Norwegian penpal, the Norwegians subtitled American and English television shows instead of dubbing them. It was cheaper than dubbing them and had the added bonus of letting people hear English. It especially helped school children who were learning English in school.

ETA: This was back in the 1970s and I don’t know if they still subtitle the television shows. He said it did help a lot of people to learn English.

There’s not a bit of difference between subtitles and dubbing, as both are attempts to translate a foreign language to English. I like the dubs a bit more because you can get yelling and other inflections you couldn’t get in subtitles.

What’s really fun is watching a movie, having both on. In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for instance, the subtitles and English translations are different in some scenes.

This reminds me of some middle aged faux-elitists sitting behind me at an art house cinema. Before the film started, one person noted to his companion that he only watched French foreign films, and only those which had been reviewed favorably in The New Yorker. He also spoke about how often he had traveled to France, but it became clear that this relatively affluent would be sophisticate did not speak French and knew practically nothing about French culture.

@Brachiator: Yeah, too bad the GOP has spent the last several years coming up with barriers to voting that predominantly exclude the poor, the blue-collar, the old, the less-educated…that might bite them come Election Day.

Yeah, too bad the GOP has spent the last several years coming up with barriers to voting that predominantly exclude the poor, the blue-collar, the old, the less-educated…that might bite them come Election Day.

@Roger Moore: Yes, the fact that you are going collectively crazy is a variation of my other reason……that being…..there are far too many Canadians who think our country should be more like the US….especially like the vision that RWNJs have of your country. That frankly scares the hell out of me.

I look forward to Frequent Anime Masturbators (..ers?) replacing Soccer Moms, Security Moms, NASCAR Dads, etc, etc as the mainstream media official “obscure demographic subset of annoying white middle class douchebags to hype on for this election cycle even though it’s just a tiny part of the electorate”.

I don’t think my 82 year old FIL has ever seen anime much less masturbated to it so not all Trump supporters fit the demographic. My FIL doesn’t vote and is probably just trolling us coz he likes to be a contrarian to my wife.